A Pakistani Christian has said he jumped from the fourth floor of the Federal Investigation Agency building in Lahore after he was tortured.

Sajid Masih, 24, was summoned for allegedly posting blasphemous material on Facebook. Police had also arrested his cousin, Patras Masih, 17, for the same alleged crime. His mobile phone was confiscated for examination and he was beaten. “When I asked them what I had done they responded, ‘We are beating you because you are the cousin of prime accused,’ ” he said in a video statement on Saturday. “They took me and Patras to the fourth floor and started beating us. We were told to call each other ‘accursed’, which my cousin complied with . . . They asked me to take off my cousin’s trousers and have sex with him. I refused.” The officials insisted, and Mr Sajid said he had no choice but to jump from the window. He is in hospital in a critical condition.

Saroop Ijaz, at Human Rights Watch, told The Times: “Legal discrimination against non-Muslims provides a toxic, enabling environment for such acts of violence.” Christians make up less than 2 per cent of Pakistan’s population of 208 million.

The Syrian government, helped by its Russian and Iranian allies, continues to bombard Eastern Ghouta. The latest information suggests that the weapons used have included chlorine gas. North Korean specialists have been seen recently at Syrian sites, confirming the open secret that Pyongyang has been supplying Damascus with chemical weapons for years.

It all goes back to the red line. Remember the red line? In 2012 Obama warned that any use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be crossing a red line. American military action would follow swiftly and assuredly. Assad then used chemical weapons.....and nothing happened. Those nice Russians guaranteed that the chemical stockpiles would be destroyed, and Obama was happy:

"Assad gave up his chemical weapons," Obama told the American public in May 2015. "That's not speculation on our part. That, in fact, has been confirmed by the organization internationally that is charged with eliminating chemical weapons."

But, inexplicably, the chemical attacks kept on happening.

In Tablet, Syrian author and chemical attack survivor Kassem Eid describes the duplicity of the Obama administration - notably Samantha Power - in enabling the continuation of the Syrian genocide, hiding the truth to justify its policy of inaction:

I first met then-Ambassador Samantha Power in the U.S.-U.N. Mission on April 14, 2014. That was two months after I fled Syria and less than a year after I survived Assad’s sarin-gas attack. When I met Ambassador Power, she told me that she was trying so hard to persuade President Obama to act decisively against the Assad regime and that she was ashamed of Obama’s inaction. She then told me about her personal experience as a journalist and activist while she was covering the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Bosnia.

I was touched by what I perceived to be Ambassador Power’s sincerity and personal experience that led her to write A Problem From Hell, which explained how politicians lie in order to avoid intervening to stop genocide. I was so honored that she gave me an autographed copy of her famous book, and in return, I gave her a copy of A Book of Syria’s Dead,which contains the names of the first 100,000 Syrians who had been killed up until that time. In that moment, I never thought that a day would come when I would find out that she was just lying to my face. Samantha Power is exactly like the genocide-enabling politicians that she wrote about herself in her book.

The Assad regime taught us in schools that there was no Holocaust and hid the truth of the crematoriums and the concentration camps where millions of Jews were brutally killed. But the Obama administration also refused to act on—or reveal—direct eyewitness testimony it received of the crematorium in Saydnaya Prison in Syria, where an estimated 100,000 people were brutally killed and then burned to ashes to hide the truth. I’d begged the U.S. administration during my meetings at the State Department back in 2014 to investigate the Saydnaya Prison and Qasioun mountain because my fellow activists in those areas had repeatedly told me since 2012 how they smelled the awful stench of burning flesh. But all I got were empty promises. If a bunch of Syrian activists knew about the crematorium, there’s no doubt in my mind that Obama knew about it from intelligence reports. I strongly suspect he made sure those reports weren’t made public to avoid having to take action against Assad. It was the Trump administration that finally showed the world this reality last year and publicized the truth that Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and President Obama tried to hide....

Ambassador Power, Ben Rhodes, and President Obama owe an apology to the Syrian and the American people for covering up the evidence of war crimes and genocide in Syria and twisting facts to serve their political agenda and public image.

February 27, 2018

A week after Billy Graham finally went off to meet his sponsor, here's Christopher Hitchens with some typically robust comments on the man. He'd been asked what he thought religious fundamentalists actually believe:

Still missed.

"Some religions simply are rackets: Scientology, for instance, or Mormonism. It's nothing more than the record of a successful con job."

In the tradition of Edward Hopper and other artists of urban alienation, Oli Kellett, with his precisely crafted street photography, captures lone figures passing each other by in the cities of modern America:

In most academic circles, especially the ones inhabited by Catharine MacKinnon and Laura Finlayson, the accusation that one is acting as a useful idiot for George W. Bush is a scarlet letter, as depraved as liking child pornography or torturing animals. But the allegation that she is a handmaiden of American imperialism is not what prompted MacKinnon to write a letter to the editor. No, it was the fear that readers of the London Review of Books might mistake her for having even the slightest sympathy for the Jewish State which stirred the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law and James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School to action. The accusation that she had “praised” the Israeli Defense Force for the record of its soldiers in not raping Palestinian women was an outrageous slander...

Had MacKinnon wanted to convince readers that her comment about the IDF and rape was not intended as a mark of approval, she should have cited an infamous Master’s thesis written over a decade ago for, incidentally, Hebrew University, wherein the author decried the absence of rapes committed by Israeli soldiers as evidence of Jewish ethno-supremacy. Because Israeli soldiers, according to Professor Tal Nitsan, are trained not to see Arab women as fully human, raping them would risk diluting the Jewish gene pool. “The lack of military rape,” therefore, “merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences” between Jews and Arabs. Israelis would be better people, in other words, if they raped Palestinians.

So, in a sense, both women are right. Finlayson reasonably assumed that MacKinnon meant to “praise” the IDF when the latter stated that its soldiers do not rape Palestinian women. Yet MacKinnon is also right that, in the “context” of the pages of the London Review of Books, the perception that one has anything remotely positive to say about Israel—including the reluctance of its soldiers to rape Palestinian women—is a form of defamation.

February 26, 2018

Photographer Viktoria Sorochinski, now based in Germany, was born in Ukraine, and has happy memories of visiting her grandparents in a small village near Kiev. On returning, years later, she found the old villages dying, with only the elderly clinging on, neglected by the government and often abandoned by their families.

Jeremy Corbyn has drafted in Andrew Murray, the controversial former communist who is chief of staff to the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, as a part-time consultant, as Labour hones its Brexit strategy.

Murray, who was seconded to Labour’s general election campaign as a donation-in-kind from Unite, the party’s biggest financial backer, is working for the leader’s office a day and a half a week, a party spokesman confirmed.

A longtime member of the communist party, who has in the past expressed solidarity with North Korea, Murray joined Labour only in 2016, after Corbyn’s victory – and is loathed by MPs on the right of the party.

It's behind the Times paywall, but there's too much for me to copy it all here. This is an interesting point, though, and perhaps one that's not fully appreciated - the appalling treatment of North Korean women in China:

China’s three-decade-long one-child policy has resulted in many families abandoning their daughters. Officially, China claims that its male to female ratio today is about equal, but unofficially there is an imbalance. Chinese men have difficulty finding brides, particularly in remote areas. North Korean women have filled this demand. Many are recruited in their North Korean cities and villages by other women, sometimes even relatives, and agree to be sold to Chinese men as wives, believing that they will have better lives and be able to support their families back home. What the women don’t know until it’s too late is that their marriages are illegal. The women are nothing more than concubines. They have no legal rights. Children born from these marriages are not considered Chinese citizens and have no access to medical care or schooling. The women’s Chinese husbands force them to abort foetuses. Knowing their lives are at risk if they remain in China, many women are desperate to escape to Thailand and then South Korea. When they do, though, the journeys are often too perilous for the children to come. They get left behind with a promise that one day the mother will return and take them to a better life.

“About 75% of the North Koreans in South Korea today are women,” says Michael Glendinning of the UK-based advocacy group European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea. “Of these, a majority have experienced gender-based violence, including rape, sex trafficking and forced marriages.”

Jihyun Park, a Manchester mother and North Korean activist, was in an abusive relationship with a Chinese man for more than six years before she managed to escape. “When I went to China in 1998, I was told that if I didn’t marry the Chinese man, I couldn’t stay,” she says. “We ladies agree because life in North Korea is so unbearable. We gamble, hoping these marriages will be the lesser of two evils.

The North Korean woman becomes for the man his agricultural worker, domestic worker and sex toy, always threatened that if she doesn’t comply, he will report her to the police and have her deported.”

One of the man's goals is to put pressure on China to stop deporting the defectors back to North Korea - to treat them as refugees rather than economic migrants.

In our most recent interview, Superman explains why it is time to disclose his endeavours. “I want my story to be known now, because my story is the story of North Korean defectors. No one seems to be hearing the voices of those most affected by international sanctions and North Korea’s policies of pursuing militarisation over the wellbeing of its people. Right now, we have the North Koreans exploiting the Winter Olympics, presenting themselves as a peaceful regime. But there are two North Korean families with children under arrest right now in China. While we’re celebrating the Olympic games, these families face repatriation and prison. I hope that the international community puts pressure on China to stop this deportation. I hope we start recognising North Koreans as refugees in need of our support. Maybe if I can shout loud enough, the world will start to listen.”